Fix Skin Tones: The ONLY Way that Works 100% – Photoshop Tutorial

Do we really need to watch this video? Can we just select the skin tone like so, type in fix the skin tone and hope that Nano Banana Pro does it for you? What is it doing? Here's the before, here's the after. I guess we're not there yet. You see, when it comes to skin tones, it is very subjective. What you might find appealing and what you want for your photo might be entirely different from my choices. So the only technique that's going to work here is our approach. What we see as a problem, what we need to fix and what we need to enhance. In this video, I'm going to take you through the complete process of fixing and matching the skin tones through an example so that you understand the approach. Keep in mind, each image is different. Your vision is different from mine. And there are a thousand videos on YouTube on how to fix skin tones and most of them are right. We will never understand Photoshop or photo editing if we just memorize the steps. We need to understand the concepts and understand the approach. And that's what we will do in this video. So without any further ado, let's get started. Back in the magical world of Photoshop, and if you wish to go ahead and download this photo, you already know what to do. Check the links in the description. Look at the image first. See what is bothering you. Fix the bigger problems first. In this case, I see that the skin is a bit more greenish. One of the easiest ways to fix that is using Hue Saturation Adjustment Layer. So click on the Adjustment Layer icon and then choose Hue Saturation. Inside of that, we need to target all of that greens. And actually, in this case, most of the skin is green. So it may target all of it. With the help of the hand right here, activate it and click on the green areas of the skin. This should pick a default color for you. For convenience, deactivate the hand so that it randomly doesn't keep on selecting stuff. Now take the Hue and the Saturation all the way to the right, just to see which areas are being affected. Of course, you can change the range of affected areas by moving this particular range slider. So I'm just going to make it very, very narrow, even the side sliders, because they control the transition, how soft or harsh the transition is. Now from the middle, we will move it around and place it in a place where it exactly targets that particular area. This is the area that we want to target. And then you can expand it further and even expand it from the corner sliders to make the transition smoother. At this point, I feel that it's targeting most of the skin. No worries, we're going to keep it like so. Let's reset everything by double clicking on the slider for Saturation and Hue. Once you have gotten the targeting right, you can move these sliders to make the color according to what you wish. If we take it more towards the right, it makes it more greener, which we do not want. And let's take it to the left. Maybe this will work for us. Minus 13. But it's kind of dark, so let's increase the lightness. Now once we do increase the lightness, what's happening is that the saturation is going away. So let's increase the saturation to compensate for that. And this is such a nice base to work on. Here's the before, and here is the after. Now, if you wanted it just on the skin, of course you can do it. So select the mask, press Ctrl or Command I to invert it, take the brush with white as the foreground color, just paint it over the subject, I guess. You can also use Object Selection tool to target it just to the skin. There are so many ways to do it, but I'm making a loose mask right there. And the reason is, the only thing we are trying to prevent are the trees in the background, and we don't want to end up creating harsh edges. This is fine for now. Before, after. Now take a step back, and then look at it again. See what is missing. In this case, I would say, if we were to whiten the teeth, it will make the skin tone more enhanced in a way. Let me show you what I mean. Click on the Adjustment Layer icon again, and this time again another Hue Saturation. With the help of the hand, click on the teeth. It's going to select a color for you. Similarly, we would take the Hue and the Saturation all the way to the right to see which areas we are targeting. And then you can make it narrow, and you want to make sure that you're targeting the teeth area, just like so. And then you can expand it from here. Similarly, from the left hand side, let's expand it fully, because we are going to be using masking anyway. Double click on the sliders to reset it. We need to brighten the teeth right? So let's increase the lightness. There you go. 20 is fine. And also decrease the saturation, because we don't want any of that. Now select the mask, press Ctrl or Command I to invert it. Take the brush with white as the foreground color. Just paint over the teeth. As simple as that. Also, let's paint on the whites of the eyes. Why not? While we are at it. Let's zoom out. And instantly, just by doing that, it makes the color pop even more. Now, as I told you before, we are going to look away again, and look at that image again to see what we are missing, or see what you want to do to that photo. In this case, I feel that the skin is a bit faded. We can add some punch to it. For that, let's use our favorite Adjustment Layer. Click on the Adjustment Layer icon and then choose Curves. We are just going to make it brighter, like so. And to add the punch, we will take the slider on the left-hand side and take it to the right-hand side. This makes the dark areas darker. Let's do it this way. There you go. And just by doing that, it adds so much more punch to the photo. If you only want it on the skin, even that can be arranged. And you don't have to paint the skin all over again. We already did it softly here. So hold the Alt key or the Option key, click and drag and drop this mask right there. Do you want to replace this current mask? Yes, of course. Hit Yes. So, without the mask? With the mask. This keeps the subject brighter, making her stand out. As I told you before, there are no fixed steps when it comes to this, when you're creating your vision. Yet, I'm creating timestamps for this video for you to refer back in case you forget something little in between. Right now, when I look at it, I feel that the skin requires a little bit of warmth. And you can do it in a lot of ways. One of my favorite ways is using color lookup tables, because why not? Keep in mind, there are so many ways to do things in Photoshop, and you choose what works for you and what you like. In this case, I'm going to create a Color Lookup Adjustment. There you go. And Crisp Warm is one of my favorite lookup tables for adding warmth. And this adds a ton of warmth. We don't want so much, so what do we do? Opacity is our friend. So, let us decrease the opacity to about 40. And this works perfectly. Maybe even 32. That is just nice. Now, the image might look perfect to you, and it might feel like it is done. You can take a break. But when you get back to it, sometimes you realize, oh my gosh, what was I thinking? Now, when you look at the face, you would realize that some tones are different from that of the neck and the body. We need to equalize it, while still keeping a little bit of difference to let her be a human. First, to make that match, click on the Adjustment Layer icon, and then pick Gradient Map. Gradient Map maps the colors of highlights, shadows, and everything in between. In other words, it lets you decide what color you want in the highlights, and what color you want in the shadows, and just everything in between. Right now, it looks like a weird negative Y, because the left hand side of the gradient represents the shadows, and the right hand side of the gradient represents the highlights. So, the highlights are right now black, and the shadows are right now white. To change it, single click on the gradient. By the way, if you're not able to see the properties, click on Properties, or go to Window, and you want to make sure Properties is checked, if you still don't see it. Single click on the gradient, and you can change the highlight to maybe white, and the shadows to maybe black. Therefore, it becomes a black and white photo. But in this case, what we actually want to do is to create a gradient of the skin tone, so that we can apply the same tones throughout. Hit OK for now. Select the mask of the gradient map, press Ctrl or Command I. Take the brush, and take a hard round brush. With white as the foreground color, just paint through and through. Start from right here, and paint like this. Why am I doing this? Once you apply the right gradient, this should not be visible. It's a sign of an incredibly done gradient for the skin tone. Now, let's go back to the gradient properties. If you don't see any properties, you can just double click on the symbol of the Adjustment Layer, single click right there, and let's start adding color to it. Let's zoom in quite a bit. Click on the highlight slider right there. Click here to set the color. Let's set it to this one for now. You can make it even brighter, that's up to you. Hit OK. And for the shadows, this one, single click on the color, and let's just pick any dark color. Let's pick this one. And we can make it darker like so. Hit OK. Now, all you need to do first is to adjust it so that none of it is visible. There you go. We are getting closer. Now, at this point, this is looking great, but this area feels desaturated. So, click on the color again, and you can increase the saturation slightly. This does the job for us. Hit OK. Now, for the dark areas, if that feels desaturated, single click right there, click here, and you can increase the saturation right there as well. There you go. You hit OK. Now, adjust it even more. It's no more visible. Now, for the extreme dark areas, you can create another slider, and let's set its color to possibly black. Now, let's zoom out by pressing Ctrl or Command minus. Can you see that line? Not anymore. It just goes on to show that we have created a great gradient. Once you're happy with it, hit OK. Now, we need to, of course, redo the mask. So, let's select the mask, drag it to the trash can, click on Delete. Now, hold the Alt key or the Option key, and click on the mask back again to create a negative mask. Now, there are so many ways you can paint on just the skin. Of course, you can do it manually, but right now, in the later versions of Photoshop, there is a Skin Select option. So, select the Object Selection tool. At the top, you'll see Select People. It automatically detects everyone. You want to make sure Sample All Layers is checked for her to be detected. Select on the person and click on Skin, Facial Skin, Upper Body Skin, and Arms. I guess that's pretty much it. Ears as well. Why did they have to separate the nose? I have no idea. Do we have anything missing? And now, with all of them selected, click on Apply. Oh, we do have something missing. Let's go back to Select People. We do have the hands missing. Upper Body Skin, Arms, Ears, Nose, Hands. Hit Apply. Now, with white as the foreground color and the mask selected, press Alt Backspace or Option Delete. There you go. Ctrl or Command D to deselect. Now, this is not perfect. As you can see, there are weird things in this area. The highlights are completely gone. So, we need to work on the gradient again. So, let's double click on the property. Single click right there. For the top right slider, let's introduce another slider and color it white. There you go. It's much better. Hit OK again. And there we have it. But it's extremely harsh. And also, we just wanted to change the colors. So, change the blend mode from Normal to Color. There you go. And again, it's too much. So, let's decrease the Opacity to about, I would say, 60 is fine. Now, while it seems to be done, there is an issue. The skin equalization has entered the lips as well. So, we need to take that away from there. Also, the cheeks add some redness. We don't want to take the blush away. So, let's turn it on. With the mask selected, take the brush and you want to make sure it's a soft round brush with black as the foreground color. Just take it away from the lips area. See the warmth added back in? You also want to make sure it's not added in the eye areas. And let's also remove it from the cheeks. There you go. Just like that. A little bit from there and bring it back maybe in this particular area. Now, at this point, you can do some last minute fixes for the skin before moving on to more enhancing steps. In this case, there is a slight tanning issue, as you can see. We can easily fix that. Not a big deal. Click on the Adjustment Layer icon and create a Curves Adjustment Layer at the very top. Just bring it down slightly so that it's taken away. Select the mask, press Ctrl or Command I to invert it. Now, take a soft round brush again, this time with a reduced flow of 5%. And then you can paint on that particular area with white. And that should do the job for you. Here's the before. Here's the after. Easily gone. After you have done what you wanted to do, increase the flow back to 100. Because otherwise, there's a high chance you might be pulling your hair on what's wrong with my brush. Guilty. After this, as a last step enhancement, you can do some Camera Raw. With the topmost layer selected, press Ctrl, Alt, Shift and E to create a Stamp Visible Layer on the top. And I like creating Stamp Visible Layer on the top so that I can see all of my layers below it. You can also club it, but this just works better for me. Go to Filter, Convert for Smart Filter so that you can change the settings later. Now, let's go to Camera Raw Filter. Now, you can do a variety of things here. Maybe decrease the Highlights to have more details here. You can also increase the Shadows slightly to make it more airy. And of course, you can also increase the Whites. By the way, if you hold the Alt key or the Option key, you will know when you're losing details. So, at this point, I'm going to leave it right at that number. Maybe 46 works. Now, to make it even more airy, you can come down to Clarity. Increasing it makes it bad, which we don't want for this kind of photo. Decreasing it makes it slightly airy. You can do the same with Texture. If you want more texture, you can increase it, but decreasing it really makes it more smoother and nicer. Again, I would recommend that you take a break. Please do take a break. Look at your photos again later. You will see something missing. For instance, in this case, when I zoom out a lot, I feel that the neck just stands out too much. Simple. You can fix this in Camera Raw. Go to the Masking section here, scroll down and select the Brush and just simply paint on this area. Nothing is happening because Flow is low. Let's increase the Flow to 100 and resume painting. And once you're done, you can just scroll down and maybe just decrease the Shadows. And that should do the job very naturally for you. I would actually scroll down even further and increase the Tint slightly. You can always go back to the Edit panel and maybe increase the Exposure even more to add that boost to everything. Hit OK once you're satisfied. And instantly, this photo just took off. Here's the overall before and here is the after. So, as I told you before, remember, you are an artist. Only you know what you want. So, I want you to take a look at your photo, think of what you want from it, think of what you want to fix or what you want to enhance and go from there. Keep in mind, in this case, we are yet to do some color grading or retouching. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you did, make sure to give us a like and also don't forget to subscribe and not just subscribe. Ring the bell so that you, my friend, don't miss any other future tips, tricks or tutorials. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in my next one. Till then, stay tuned and make sure that you keep creating.